Aunt Arianne inclined her head formally, and they all awkwardly followed her lead, and then sat down with her in the grass, ending up in a rough circle with the stone vampire and the automaton, as if all six of them were having a meeting.
“That was Lynsey,” Aunt Arianne announced. “Leaving as you arrived.”
So much had been happening that Eluned had almost forgotten the one solid lead they’d hoped to pursue—the person who had brought the artificial fulgite commission to their parents. She had barely looked at the tall, blond woman.
“Right one?” Eleri asked.
“Impossible to say. She did not react to me—or to sight of you—with any obvious awareness or guilt. But she has a very interesting connection to pursue.”
Unhurriedly, Aunt Arianne took them from Lynsey Blair to Lord Fennington, a person Eluned had heard of mainly for hosting dinner parties on the Tamesas during the autumn feastings. But he apparently funded a great deal of scientific research, and so they agreed it was a good idea to pretend to be interested in going to his school.
“Can we take Melly?” Eleri asked, unexpectedly.
“Melly’s left school,” Eluned said, surprised. “Why would we take her?”
“Because she’s left school. I asked Nabah about it. Melly loves words. She writes poetry. But Melly thinks that she has to look after the store for her father, even though Dem Ktai would far rather she did something she loved. Melly says she can write poetry anywhere.”
“But that’s true.”
“I don’t need to keep up school to make automatons. You don’t need to go to that atelier you keep talking about: you can draw already. But you know that to keep on alone would be like leaving yourself still a sketch. Half the person you could be, a plant that never got enough water. Why should Melly not be everything she could be because the Crown only pays for schooling until you’re sixteen?”
“How does taking her to this Tangleways place help? If it’s a boarding school, won’t it be more expensive than the school she was already going to?”
“So? We can pay her fees. It’s not like we can’t afford it.”
Eleri waved a hand to encompass a distant room crammed with treasures, but Eluned looked instead at their aunt, ominously silent behind her veil. Would being suddenly rich loosen previously tight purse-strings? Or make her worse?
“I suspect you overlook the small matter of pride, Eleri,” Aunt Arianne said, voice quiet but at least not sounding annoyed. “I have no objection to you inviting your friends along on a trip to the country, however. I expect you’ll all find a visit to Tangleways enjoyable. The original house was inherited by a brother and sister who spent the rest of their lives competing with extravagant extensions and outbuildings. And then the whole thing passed on to a man of a very odd and secretive nature. It sat empty for a long time after his death.”
That word brought them all up against the thing that none of them had spoken of, but which had filled their minds ever since they had returned home. It was Griff who asked, in a shy voice very unlike his usual manner.
“Who would be in charge of us? If—if what the dryw said is right?”
Aunt Arianne didn’t answer immediately. Then she reached up and took off her hat and veil, wincing only a little in the deepening haze of the late afternoon light. She wasn’t smiling.
“Tante Sabet,” she said. “Your great-aunt, Sabet d’Lourien. Once things have settled down, I must take you to Lutèce so you can meet her.”
“If you’re alive,” Eleri said, because Eleri of all of them could.
“If I’m alive.” Aunt Arianne glanced up at the girl gazing forever at the sky, and her hand lifted briefly, then she dropped it down. “I own, the shadow of death looms less large when you’ve recently had your throat torn open. Besides, even if that was what he meant, the pronouncements of dryw are not considered inevitabilities, but instead in the nature of warnings and challenges. Did you notice that there were two separate foretellings?”
Griff straightened. “When he pointed?”
“Yes. Nor are either of those foretellings necessarily for a single person, but Keeper Tyse felt quite certain that the visual indication was to make clear that the second was for one or all of us standing inside the house. Possibly still me, of course, but we’d already established that this undertaking had risks. I must teach you three to shoot, once the trunks I’d put into storage arrive.”
Without denying the danger, Aunt Arianne made it all seem far less dramatic, and Eluned felt herself relax even though the acknowledgement hadn’t changed anything at all.
“The first foretelling is the larger problem,” Aunt Arianne added. “The coafor are obliged to report them, you know, though given the audience we had, I wouldn’t be surprised if half the borough is already discussing it over evening meal. Talk of the fate of Albion and a shattered dragon is bound to attract attention—not even counting the Unionist and the aide of Prince Gustav playing witness. That will make quiet investigation a great deal more difficult. Not, I admit, that we’ve succeeded in escaping notice so far. You’ll find when you go upstairs that someone found a way in and started searching the attic, until the folies chased them off. That one bothers me because I didn’t notice them. The attic is on the edge of my ability to sense the living, but I can usually tell when someone’s up there.”
“You think maybe it was a shabti?”
Aunt Arianne smiled at Griff’s eager tone. “I hope not, since that would suggest we’re at risk of a visit from those sphinxes as well. But at any rate it seems safest to leave Monsieur Doré here, and to never discuss things we particularly don’t want overheard anywhere but Hurlstone. How did your tour of the workshops go?”
“Have what parts can be bought now. And recommendation for a foundry able to cast the others. Used up the money.”
Eleri had also bought three vices, and it had been lucky Nabah and Melly had been along to help carry them back. But that surely wasn’t what their aunt had meant.
“There was lots of talk of haunted automata,” Eluned said. “We didn’t have to ask, just listen.”
“They were making it up to impress each other,” Griff put in.
“Maybe. No-one there had seen any automata activing themselves, anyway.” As their own automaton continued to sit unmoving—at least while they were there.
“We’ll go further tomorrow,” Eleri said. “The best workshops are north of the river, near the airship fields. We can look for the one that makes dragonflies.”
But Aunt Arianne was shaking her head.
“No, tomorrow we’ll be clothes shopping. Because the day after, we’re going to the palace to take afternoon tea with Princess Leodhild. And, I hope, hear the results of Dem Makepeace’s investigations in Caerlleon.”
THIRTEEN
As Aunt Arianne paid the taxi driver, Eluned carefully straightened her new ankle-length shendy and matching split tunic, immensely aware of the guards standing behind soaring gates, and the crowds of sightseers on the enormous paved area in front of Gwyn Lynn Palace. Only visitors for the palace drove up onto this paved area, but they’d normally have the gates opened for them and drive on through, rather than walk.
Griff, the reason for the eccentricity, was indifferent to their audience, clutching his new sketchbook and spinning in a circle to drink in his surroundings, and then keeping on for several further rotations, delighting in the way his long, pleated shendy flared out into a bell. They were all rather pleased with the new clothes. Mother had been impatient with impractical clothing, so the fine cloth and exact tailoring Aunt Arianne deemed necessary for afternoon tea with a princess became a treat in itself.